Gov. Gary Herbert slammed the federal government for interfering in Utah's affairs in his State of the State speech Wednesday. He can be proud the federal government is already out of Utah's Mormon crickets.
A lot of other things, too, but the crickets may be the canary in Utah's federal funding coal mine.
The Mormon cricket will eat the paint off your farmhouse after it eats your crops. It can travel in swarms so thick UDOT has to use plows to clear roads made slick by cricket goo.
For years Utah has sought federal help to battle Mormon crickets. Funds were impossible through normal channels, so our congressional people, doing their jobs, got cricket funds via earmarks.
Remember earmarks? They were bridges to nowhere. They were "Washington as usual." They were evil.
Farmers watching crickets eat their livelihoods disagreed. If crickets eat 100,000 acres of crops --which is how many they infested last year -- at $1,000 an acre, you're talking serious crop loss.
Two years ago Congress, in a burst of political purity, banned earmarks.
Rob Hougaard, director of plant industry in the Utah Department of Agriculture, said several years before that Utah received what he fondly calls "the Bennett money." Then-Sen. Robert Bennett got Utah a $6 million earmark to control grasshoppers and crickets.
Our lawmakers used to love earmarks. Rep. Rob Bishop put $94 million in earmarks into the 2010 budget, which meant lots of Utah jobs and programs.
One Bishop earmark was $9.6 million for an automated composite technologies and manufacturing center at ATK Space Systems in Clearfield. Rob's a member of the Tea Party caucus that lambasted earmarks, but if you work for ATK, or hope Utah has a future in defense contracting, that $9.6 million made a difference Utah could never have matched.
Weber State University got a $750,000 earmark to expand its nursing program.
Chris Millard is director of the WSU office of sponsored projects. She said earmarks were only a tiny fraction of the university's budget, but loss of future earmarks, combined with a general drying up of federal funds, could endanger your health.
Why? Despite Gov. Herbert's anti-federal "Utah can do it" bluster, Utah is not making up the difference.
Quite the opposite.
"In the last two years the Legislature has cut 17 percent of our budget," Millard said. "We have bigger class sizes. We're doing more with less."
Except in nursing.
The State Board of Nursing requires WSU to have only 10 students per nursing class for a very good reason. Pack an English Lit class, students might end up hazy on Beowulf. That's sad.
Overcrowd a nursing class, you get nurses who are hazy on your medications. That's fatal.
There's a shortage of nurses. WSU has hundreds of applicants.
"We don't have enough faculty to teach them and we can't accept more because the Legislature won't fund us," Millard said. So far this year, no increase in funding for higher education is proposed.
In fact, Rep. John Dougall, R-American Fork, has proposed cutting income and sales taxes in Utah by $600 million.
Is he nuts? Income taxes directly fund Utah's education. Perhaps Dougall never needs a nurse.
There are some years that farmers in American Fork deal with Mormon crickets. The cricket population tends to rise and fall depending on the weather. Utah's huge agricultural industry has to be ready.
When the "Bennett money" runs out in a year or so, Hougaard will ask the Legislature to step up.
If it funds crickets the way it funds nursing education, farmers better start praying for another miracle of the gulls.
Wasatch Rambler is the opinion of Charles Trentelman. You can call him at 801-625-4232 or e-mail ctrentelman@standard.net. He also blogs at www.standard.net.
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